4
Mr. Stutz, weighted down with luggage, led Vera and Daniel into his employer’s house. He did not trouble to knock. After fifteen years together both he and Alec Monkman walked in and out of one another’s houses with the same freedom as they poked their noses into one another’s lives. If they had been encumbered with women this could never have happened; a woman’s sense of privacy would have been outraged, there would have been a stop to it. But as someone in Connaught once said, neither Stutz nor Monkman needed a wife. They had a marriage of sorts already. Sometimes this surely seemed so. Their squabbles shared characteristics with those of long- established couples. They hinted at a rich background of past grievance, were conducted with fearsome tenacity, yet managed to avoid topics that would make for a permanent rupture. Mr. Stutz no longer invited Monkman to attend church and Monkman no longer badgered Mr. Stutz to join him in a drink.
Stutz was surprised to find the kitchen empty. Where was Alec? He thumped down the suitcases he carried and Daniel unslung a duffel bag from his shoulder. “Alec?” Stutz inquired, walking to the entrance of the living room, Vera trailing behind. His ruddy face was moistly shining as if it had been rubbed with butter, which was the way it always looked in hot weather. Summer was a trial for Mr. Stutz. A big man in the midst of a fleshy middle-age, he panted through June, July, and August, the sun bleaching his blond eyebrows fairer and fairer and burning his face redder and redder until when Labour Day rolled round he was all scarlet and white.
“I expect he’s upstairs napping,” he said, peering into the curtained living room. “He doesn’t seem to get much sleep nights lately.” Vera did not respond to this remark. She did not respond because she had not heard it. Mr. Stutz, realizing his information had gone unabsorbed, turned back into the kitchen and left her staring into the dim room, standing with her pelvis tilted forward so that the cardboard box she held was supported on the points of her hip bones. For two days this box had never been out of her sight. Over the objections of the bus driver she had insisted it ride in an overhead rack where she could keep an eye on it and be sure it wasn’t lost. In it were birth certificates, a cancelled insurance policy, old bank passbooks, her Army discharge papers, two hundred dollars’ worth of Canada Savings Bonds, and six school exercise-books in which her husband had kept a diary. These were, as she had said to the driver, important documents that had to be watched.
Now, however, the documents were unwatched and forgotten, jostled out of her mind by two murky brown reproductions of nineteenth-century book illustrations across the way, on the wall. They struck her a disturbing blow. Vera knew with absolute certainty that they were hung in exactly the same positions as that day seventeen years ago when she turned her back on them and left her father’s house. Today she faced them again. The long- horned, shaggy-coated Highland cattle still drank deeply from a burn, misty mountains rising behind them in a romantic backdrop. An expressive-eyed, cupid-lipped, cloudy-haired Lorna Doone still simpered. Everything was so familiar, it was as if the intervening years had suddenly been dismissed. This dismissal made Vera feel cheated and angry. She had not lived through so much hardship to find herself back where she had begun, back in 1942, furious with her father. He had always claimed to hate those pictures which her mother had admired for “being tastefully understated.” He had described them as dark and gloomy. So why hadn’t he taken them down, changed them? Changed
Vera set down the cardboard box and stepped into the living room. The old fake candelabra with its flame- shaped electrical bulbs still dangled from the ceiling. The sofa with the carved cat’s paw feet still stood where she had left it, although now it was spread with a blanket to hide worn upholstery. Even her mother’s Singer sewing machine was where it always had been, in the bay window for the user to get the benefit of sunlight. Except now the sewing machine was folded down into its cabinet and a litter of torn envelopes and bills on the cabinet top suggested her father was using it as a desk. Nothing new in the entire room, aside from a television in the corner. She was back in the past. All of it more or less the same, except maybe for the smell. That was different. A bachelor smell of sour potatoes, dirty socks, stale cigarette smoke. A heavy, brooding stuffiness that made Vera think of windows painted shut, impossible to pry open.
Vera sensed someone had entered the room. She turned around to see Mr. Stutz standing a few feet off, hands clasped over his belly, looking as if he were hers to command. Once again, as she had when he met them at the bus stop, Vera found herself speculating which was Mr. Stutz’s famous glass eye, the one which Earl had written her about so often during the war. The left, she decided. Despite the gloom of drawn drapes, Vera believed she had detected an unnatural glint of light in it.
“It smells in here,” she said abruptly. “What kind of cleaning lady has he got himself?”
“Not a very good one,” replied Stutz, a slow smile breaking on his face. “I guess I’m what you’d call his cleaning lady.”
“You?”
“Well, not regular,” he explained. “Just when things get a bit out of hand. The old fellow doesn’t mind cooking for himself but he’s not much of a one for the cleaning up. When it gets bad I’ll wash the dishes, maybe run the vacuum back and forth, do his laundry. Thing is, these old people got a tendency to be awfully untidy.”
“You shouldn’t be doing that,” said Vera firmly. “You ought to have told him to clean up his own mess or else hire somebody to do it for him.”
“He’s had some of those,” said Stutz, “but they always got into trouble with him for moving things. The old gentleman is particular on that point. He likes things to stay where he left them. I generally just clean around his stuff. He prefers that.”
“Whatever his nibs prefers. I see that hasn’t changed either. He still expects things to be organized to suit him and only him.”
“There’s some old dogs I wouldn’t go trying to learn new tricks,” said Stutz. Vera wasn’t sure how to take this. As warning, advice, or reproof.
“I’m not a dog trainer, Mr. Stutz. Never had any desire to be.”
“I just came to ask if you wanted him called,” said Stutz evenly.
“I suppose he ought to know we’re here.”
The two of them returned to the kitchen, Mr. Stutz brushing past Daniel who leaned against the kitchen sink, turning the hot water faucet on and off, alerting the adults he was bored. “That’s not doing the washer any good,” Stutz said to him as he pulled open the door to a narrow staircase. He poked his head up it and shouted, “Hey, Alec! Your company’s here! Get up!” When he got no immediate answer he pounded on the wall of the stairway with his fist, making it boom hollowly. “Hey, Alec! Get up!”
“What?” The voice was muffled, distant.
“Get up,” repeated Mr. Stutz. “Your company’s come.”
They heard coughing, a shoe dropped on the floor. Several minutes passed and then the stairs began to creak as Alec Monkman started his heavy-footed descent. Listening to his slow, deliberate progress Vera found her heart beating quickly. Her mother had described her father in his youth as a wonderful dancer, amazingly agile and light on his feet for such a large man. “It was like dancing with a big cat,” was how she had put it to her daughter. Coming down the stairs he did not sound like a big cat.
And then he was there, poised in the doorway. It had been six years since he had sent her his last photograph. He looked different. For one thing, he had new teeth. Teeth too large, too white, too regular and even. They seemed to prevent his lips from closing. They shone almost as much as the glass in his spectacles. Another thing. He had taken to carrying his head thrust well forward, as if he were straining to see through, to penetrate, a thick fog. It was impossible for Vera to tell whether he had gone grey or bald because of the straw fedora he wore. She judged the hat too small. Like Oliver Hardy’s, it made him appear fatter, grosser than he really was. It was downright unflattering.
Monkman lingered in the doorway several moments more, teeth gleaming as he studied his visitors. Then, abruptly, he took the final step down into the kitchen. “So, Vera,” he said in a loud, harsh voice, “you made it safe and sound.”
“That’s me, safe and sound.”
He shuffled nearer, still peering, neck craned. “It’s good to have you home, daughter,” he said at last, reaching out and awkwardly patting her shoulder.
Handles me like a horse in a stall with a bad reputation for kicking, she thought. Nevertheless, she realized her own hand had gone out to rest gently on his forearm. She quickly withdrew it. “How’ve you been keeping,
